Let Me Take You by the Hand: True Tales from London's Streets

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I have read the book in large chunks, stopping every now and then to absorb what I’d read (and also when other books – and life – needed attention) and I’m glad it has taken me this long to read it because it has stayed with me even during the times when I wasn’t actually reading it. Notwithstanding the fact that Kavanagh is bound to work within a modern ethical framework, she manages to access some compelling stories. Kavanagh’s writing too reflects a city in transition, albeit one where people are perhaps now more habituated to change.

I overthink and have trouble sleepin’ / All purpose gone and don’t have a reason / And there’s no doctor to stop this bleedin’ / So I left home and jumped in the deep end,” Ed Sheeran sings in verse one.Now when he had departed from there, he met Jehonadab the son of Rechab coming to meet him; and he greeted him and said to him, “Is your heart right, as my heart is with your heart? While many have patchwork jobs – sometimes two different jobs to make a bit extra to supplement a day job that doesn’t pay enough to get by – they all value the freedom of being out-of-doors and interacting with the public.

Kavanagh’s own writing is no match either for Henry Mayhew or for the scores of interviewees who furnish her with their vivid self-portraits. No one in this obsessively productive landscape is allowed to be anything other than on the go, all the time. Charles Dickens, famously, used Mayhew’s database of voices and experiences as a source book for peopling the odd, dark corners of his novels.On London is run by Dave Hill, formerly the Guardian's award-winning London commentator, and written by him and an array of fellow Londoncentrics. Those two great modern 20 th-century masters of the art, Studs Terkel and Tony Parker, showed what extraordinary things could happen when you got out of the way and let drowned-out voices speak up. She now sets up micro-credit programmes, mainly in Africa, and is a facilitator for the conflict resolution programme, Alternatives to Violence project. Hall’s work staked out key policy areas that London regional government in the form of the Greater London Authority – at that stage, barely up and running – would grapple with for the next two decades: insufficient housing, poor transport options, employment insecurity, growing inequality and entrenched poverty.

Eric has performed internationally in Japan, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Singapore Malaysia, Athens, Thessaloniki Greece, Nice, and Paris, France. He was playing at the Bottom Line, a club in New York, and I never forgot all the energy and joy that this man brought to the audience.As the government’s national archive for England, Wales and the United Kingdom, The National Archives hold over 1,000 years of the nation’s records for everyone to discover and use. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she finds that she and the two colleagues she worked with interviewed people of some 25 nationalities. The rise of the gig economy has brought a multitude of drivers and cyclists, delivering and moving goods, transporting meals and people, all organized through smart phones but using the same streets as Mayhew’s informants. The conversations obviously pre-date the Covid pandemic and I did find myself wondering how many of the characters coped during the past 18 months. We all adjusted as best we could, but how did those whose lives were precariously balanced before the lockdowns, with no savings to draw on or network for support, manage?